Things are breaking loose

Are You Going To Entropy Faire?

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunster

1 April 2013

Things are breaking loose. Holes have appeared in the fabric of fraud and lies that passes for the world money system. They are black holes, gravitationally sucking in the things breaking loose, and as these things cross their event horizons, they will never be seen again. These things I speak of are the collateral for vast nebulae of falsely generated debts and obligations that were never intended to be honored (i.e. regarded as real). As they vanish down the wormholes of time, they take with them their pretenses of money value, meaning they leave reverberations of impoverishment in the shadowy place that the real world has become.

The process described above - an alchemy of physics - will begin to shed light where the shadows have been, revealing a much harsher world in sharp contours and shocking color, for instance: red, the color of ink representing losses on real balance sheets of every household, every enterprise, and every government the whole world round. A scramble for safety now ensues, not just to lay hold of anything with remaining real "moneyness," but for the resources that drive the kind of economies we have. In other words, for gold and silver, and for oil and gas.

Of course, great geopolitical forces spin in the background. Only idiots subscribe to the paranoid fantasies of "one world government" and "global currencies." In the scramble underway, the things falling apart include units of governance, breaking into smaller pieces: empires, nation states. These will include the unraveling European Union but also the matrix of agreements and protocols that binds together the West - everything from the IMF to the G-7 to the World Bank - into an entropy express. One rather extreme scenario I do subscribe to was laid out by blogger JIM WILLIE recently: the effort by Russia, China, and others to isolate and neutralize the US dollar as the world's so-called reserve currency by systematically converting holdings of US Treasury bills into gold wherever possible, and to thereby diminish the baleful influence of the Imperial US behemoth. They are assisted in this endeavor by the US itself in its bungling efforts to manipulate and suppress gold prices, as well as our prevarications as to exactly how much gold remains in the various places it is supposed to be stashed - Fort Knox, West Point, and the sub-basement labyrinth of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - generating ever-greater uncertainty about the extant world gold supply, and hence its value relative to things like currencies. Nobody here can even ask the right questions.

While The New York Times focuses on the momentous issue of real estate sales in the Hamptons, Russia and China will build gold-backed currencies aimed at monopolizing the trade in mineral and energy resources, leaving America and much of Europe to freeze in the dark and sit on gasoline lines at the empty filling stations. For a while that will work to the East's advantage - until it becomes clear that the entropic contraction of industrial economies is for everyone as we veer into a literal world made by hand. That's right, sooner or later Russia and China will get theirs, too. But in the meantime they have the ability to make the story a lot more interesting.

There's plenty of suspense this Easter weekend as observers nervously await the breaking action, to find out how much the oft-cited fear of confiscation has penetrated the regional money centers around Europe. Slovenia, a fairy-tale republic somewhere between Austria and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has been nominated by observers as the place most likely to be whacked by EU treasure confiscators. It owes about 10 billion Euros to the EU entropy cloud, with exactly zero chances of meeting its obligations. But then, it's in the nature of such non-linear event sequences that the shadows of the black swan's wings will pass over Slovenia and alight on a chimney-top in some utterly surprising place, say, Latvia or perhaps even Italy. In any case, European money will be on fire and a lot of that smokin' moolah surely will wend its way into the US equity markets under the illusion of safety. It's all just an accident waiting to happen. Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.

There must be an inverse relationship between the juiced S & P index and the IQs of the public figures in America who pretend to be able to think, so that there are now just six remaining people in the political arena who can articulate the various parts of the mega-swindle that besets us: Bill Black, Jim Rickards, Bill Moyers, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and David Stockman. Stockman is out with a new book, The Great Deformation, that manages to concentrate all the requisite outrage in one gale of rectified objurgation. It is a pleasure to read Stockman - former budget director under Reagan and Michigan congressman - call out the villains from Reagan to Bernanke to Paulson to Rubin and scores of others in the most opprobrious terms. Stockman characterizes the financial action of recent decades a "leveraged buyout of the USA" and it sure looks that way. If you travel around the towns of the upper Hudson Valley - once an industrial corridor full of Jimmy Stewart type burgs - it's beginning to look like the country Borat grew up in. Everything of value that wasn't nailed down was taken, and everything that remains is broken, including the ragged population.

On Sunday night, wire stories had Cyprus close to "going Icelandic," that is, hoisting the middle finger to Brussels and repudiating the money owed. That option may end up seeming more attractive to virtually everybody in the broke world, including even the young college loan debt donkeys of the USA, groaning under their loads as they stand idle in the barren fields of unemployment. Imagine, all those people thinking that nirvana is a place of cold and darkness... with the vague odor of rotting fish hanging in the still air.